“Apple’s introduction of the iPhone on Tuesday underscores the lesson Motorola learned with the Razr: A sleek, sexy design can create lots of buzz and drive sales, but without smart, usable interface design, consumers will end up angry and disinclined to buy your next ‘hot’ mobile-phone offering,” Jessie Scanlon and Helen Walters report for BusinessWeek.
Scanlon and Walters report, “Design has nominally been a priority of cell-phone makers for a while now, at least since Nokia took the No. 1 spot in the market, thanks, in part, to its focus on color and style. Samsung played the design card in its rise. Then came LG, with its ‘Chocolate.’ But design, as these companies have embraced it, is little more than styling. It is design in the service of product lust, rather than user experience.”
Related article:
Chocolate Cellphone Only Looks Sweet; Its Design Is Flawed – Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, August 03, 2006
Scanlon and Walters continue, “The navigation system of its iPod was both radical and defiantly simple—and it is with this same philosophy in mind that Apple has mounted its charge on the cell-phone industry. For some, it hasn’t come a moment too soon. ‘Finally we have what appears to be a cell phone designed for ordinary human beings, not just for children with incredibly thin fingers, brains of scientists, and better than 20-20 vision,’ says London-based designer Malcolm Garrett, creative director at the Applied Information Group.”
“Incorporating the existing Mac OS X operating system into the unit is a major step forward, one which Adaptive Path President and usability expert Jesse James Garrett reckons will provide a major headache for competitors. ‘Apple has been able to work backwards from its own OS, making adjustments to work on a smaller screen,’ he says. ‘This is not functionality that you can tack onto the existing phone operating systems out there. That has to be very troubling to the competition because it’s going to take them years to develop similar technical sophistication. Mobile-phone Web browsers are uniformly awful.’ The iPhone, of course, uses Apple’s own Safari browser,” Scanlon and Walters report.
Scanlon and Walters report, “The gauntlet truly has been thrown down. No doubt between now and June, when the iPhone is released, competing cell-phone, smartphone, and PDA makers will be scrambling to come up with devices that have the look, feel, and functionality of Apple’s offering. Let’s just hope that the hardware makers and carriers alike grasp the power of user-driven design and great customer experience. Like the music industry before it, the cell-phone industry needs a shakeup.”
Much more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Wired News: Steve Jobs’ iPhone shows the future – January 12, 2007
Cringely: Apple iPhone will suddenly go 3G, gain features, and be renamed ‘Apple Phone’ – January 12, 2007
Apple’s Phil Schiller gives CBS News hands-on tour of iPhone – January 12, 2007
20 unanswered questions about Apple’s iPhone – January 11, 2007
Report: iPhone could be upgraded to 3G with software update if Apple wishes – January 11, 2007
Report: Rogers Communications to offer Apple iPhone in Canada – January 11, 2007
David Pogue: hands on preview of Apple’s iPhone, ‘gorgeous and so packed with possibilities’ – January 11, 2007
PC Magazine hands-on test of Apple iPhone: multi-touch UI ‘takes the breath away’ – January 11, 2007
Mossberg’s initial take on Apple iPhone: ‘radical and gorgeous’ with ‘brilliant new user interface’ – January 11, 2007
NewsWeek’s Levy interviews Apple CEO Steve Jobs about iPhone – January 11, 2007
Why Apple’s iPhone doesn’t do high-speed mobile phone networks (yet) – January 11, 2007
RealMoney: Apple just blew up the whole damn mobile-phone supply chain with its new iPhone – January 11, 2007
ZDNet: Hands on with Apple’s iPhone: ‘elegant, ravishing, simple, sleek; impeccable & intuitive UI’ – January 11, 2007
Apple iPhone FUD campaign begins – January 10, 2007
Nine ways Apple changed the face of consumer electronics yesterday – January 10, 2007
Analysts and investors applaud arrival of Apple iPhone – January 10, 2007
Top 10 things to love and top 10 things to hate about the Apple iPhone – January 10, 2007
How Apple kept the iPhone top secret for 30 months – January 10, 2007
Hands-on with Apple’s iPhone – January 10, 2007
The only thing really wrong with Apple’s iPhone is its name – January 09, 2007
Is Apple building ‘The Device?’ [revisited] – January 09, 2007
Analyst Bajarin: Apple’s iPhone and Apple TV are industry game changers – January 09, 2007
Time: ‘iPhone could crush cell phone market pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority’ – January 09, 2007
Analyst: Apple iPhone should be given its own category – ‘brilliantphone’ – January 09, 2007
Cingular to use Synchronoss Technologies’ platform for Apple iPhone – January 09, 2007
iPhone photos from Apple’s Macworld Expo booth – January 09, 2007
Enderle: Apple’s iPhone is going to do very well – January 09, 2007
Apple debuts iPhone: touchscreen mobile phone + widescreen iPod + Internet communicator – January 09, 2007
USA Today writer: Apple iPhone is an ‘ordinary, average product’ at heart – January 12, 2007
FUD Alert: Analyst – I am pretty skeptical Apple’s iPhone can succeed – January 11, 2007
The Register’s Ray: Apple ‘iPhone’ will fail – December 26, 2006
Analyst: Apple iPhone economics aren’t that compelling – December 08, 2006
CNET editor Kanellos: ‘Apple iPhone will largely fail’ – December 07, 2006
Palm CEO laughs off Apple ‘iPhone’ threat – November 20, 2006
i too prefer my bloated industries shaken not stirred
MDN MW: ten- as in a LEAST ten iCopies to be near market by june–but, they still won’t be as good as Apple’s
Where’s the MDN Take? :-p
By the way: The iPhone is already being offered as a pre-order item by Amazon Germany:
Amazon.de: Apple iPhone 8GB Handy: Elektronik
The unbundled 8GB version is being offered for €999,- (including 19% VAT and without a carrier contract), the 4GB version is €899,-.
And – here’s the kicker – the €999,- 8GB version already tops the best sellers list in its category!:
Amazon.de Bestseller
It may be a short-lived temporary lead, but it’s certainly indicating that the price isn’t completely scaring people off, won’t you say…?
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The 4GB version scores at position 94 right now, by the way.
With 200 patents in the phone, I doubt any other phone company will be using Multi-Touch in the near future.
just so you all know, in case you havent gotten there yet. Apple has just begun the killing of the cell phone, pc, camera, digital camera and the likes. Cell industry wont exist it 10 years. Wifi, .11z and whatever else will make cellular technology not needed. Now, someone made mention earlier today about the rumored apple keyboard with an ipod, apple phone dock. This won’t be a product. Bluetooth allows for wireless transfer. so just add wireless keyboard, wireless monitor and you have a mini version of the mac mini. get it yet? Apple is making computing so small that no one will be able to compete. OS X is just going to keep getting more embedded, and more sleek, and more powerful. Indeed, minority report is here, just wait until you see the notebooks without keyboards, or until you use your apple phone as your remote to your apple tv, it has 802.11b/g and n is coming. Apple in the next five years is going to redefine everything. their head start is allowing them the next 10 or so years to dominate in any which way the want. Thank you OS X.
ping,
thanks for that!
It’s incredible!
For a price of about €1000 (Yes, that’s about $1300!!), the iPhone is already a bestseller in Germany!
THIS THING IS GOING TO BE HUGE!
BUT HUGE!
“Let’s just hope that the hardware makers and carriers alike grasp the power of user-driven design and great customer experience.”
I think we can safely say that WON’T happen, if past experience in personal computing is anything to go by, especially if they run that God-aweful Windows.
jarrettnewsdaily: i totally agree!
Makes me wonder…
Why didn’t they hold off and debut/release when ready?
Why give competitors 6 mos. now to emulate?
Jobs said that he waited 2 and 1/2 years to introduce the iPhone. I doubt that anyone will develop a similar device and construct a distribution scheme in 6 months. Besides, Jobs felt confident that no one will match the form and function of the iPhone in 5 years time. By then, Apple will have introduced other and better products. Surely, by now, you must realize that what you can expect from Apple is the unexpected.
jarrettnewsdaily – It was me who mentioned the rumoured wired keyboard Dock. Why wired? Because the iPhone needs POWER and a wired keyboard will easily hide a large battery below its keys to boost up a connected iPhone.
It’s clear now that the iPhone holds a full version of Leopard (or will in a few weeks time!). That processing power ain’t gonna be limited to a few pretty mobile phone functions when it can run the likes of Photoshop, Office etc.
Expect the iPhone to be a tiny Mac hub operating through a choice of small dumb terminals – whether screens or keyboard. Remember – Apple thrives on minimalism and whatever it can strip away from a traditional desktop or laptop computer set-up and STILL keep its quality user experience – it will!
Right now there are TWO DIRTY words at Apple: One is ‘COMPUTER’ and the other is ‘MACINTOSH’!!
The future is Apple’s to take.
The genius of the iPhone is that is will be part of a greater infrastructure that Apple is building toward. The reason why they built stores is because they have a slew of product in mind to fill the shelves with. It shows that Apple is operating with a vision other companies don’t have. Without that vision, the other’s will strive just to keep up while Apple leaps ahead again and again. This will not stop until somebody else can make the hardware and software too, which will take years just to get underway.
Apple is doing what people who know what they want, want. To really surf the web on their phones, the other phone companies and manufacturers could not figure out how to do this (wap browsing a joke). Visual voice mail, again no one else did this. Maybe Moto, Nokia, LG etc. couldn’t aford to work with just one of the service providers (Cingular, Verison etc.) to provide this service. Simple idea, all those other companies never thought of it. They all forced what they wanted on the customers and we had few choices, and yes I know they didn’t put a gun to my head to get a cell and pay for the service but a billion cells were sold last year alone so they have become almost a necessity similar to a car. That many paying customers and advancements were few and far between. Watch them all jump now that there is a new kid on the block who will reach into their pockets and just take the money out. Go to the forums (Cingular Customer Forums, HowardForum) and read all the dissatisfaction that people are living with and how bad customer service really is when customers just try to get their phones to do what they were bought for in the first place. Apple will help change this, this is what competion is really all about..
Theres no way they’ll charge €999 for that 8gig imo.
Wrong. Design is very much a part of the user interface and thus the user experience. You dont mix a bunch of chemicals in test tube and end up with a UI. Apple DESIGNS their interfaces. Design is not pretty pictures or forms. Design is arrangement of systems in a usable and aesthetically pleasing manner.
Again part of the reason why most companies get it wrong, they don’t know what design is.
Where the hell did Multi-touch come from? It solely belongs to Apple? There’s this old video of a Multi-touch demonstration on the net, I’m sure you’ve run into it by now. Was that produced by Cupertino?
Here’s the video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6379146923853181774
Says it’s not produced by Apple but instead “researchers.” That holds no weight but the video has to be Apple’s if they patented this, right?
Apple should create a registry of sorts for their iPhones. Buy one, register it with Apple. If (or when) it gets stolen, file a police report, contact the Apple registry, and the iPhone gets disabled the next time it’s turned on within a cell coverage area. Should cut back on theft, which I would appreciate being a past iPod victim. (They could even do this with present iPods, using iTunes as the disabler.)
FTA:
“Apple has been able to work backwards from its own OS, making adjustments to work on a smaller screen,” he says. “This is not functionality that you can tack onto the existing phone operating systems out there. That has to be very troubling to the competition because it’s going to take them years to develop similar technical sophistication. Mobile-phone Web browsers are uniformly awful.” The iPhone, of course, uses Apple’s own Safari browser.
“… and PDA makers will be scrambling to come up with devices that have the look, feel, and functionality of Apple’s offering.”
Ah, but they can’t, except superficially. They don’t have the power of OS X. And Apple will defend its slew of patents, so forget about copying Apples clever sensor assisted gesture based inputs and other real innovations. The competition is truly screwed.
The so called “copies” will be like those done by the Pacific Islanders’ cargo cults who thought they could wave down aluminum birds from the gods filled with goodies that they observed being done by American Army Air ground crews during world war II. These hunter gatherer culture people would use a couple of half coconut cores attached together with rope to look like headsets and some paddles to wave at the sky, but couldn’t figure out why it did not work for them.
Game over man, game over!
MW: space, as in: For the competition the iPhone may as well have come from an advanced civilization from outer space. It is beyond their skill set.
With 200 new patents for this device alone, it’s clear that Apple has learned from the past.
If the multi-touch screen isn’t patented as such (because it wasn’t Apple’s invention) I presume many of the movements and/or functions of the screen will have been.
This phone is going to be almost impossible to ‘copy’. We’re more likely just going to see cheap imitations.
The iPhone is the ultimate halo device.
The real long-term plan and real genius of the iPhone is that it, even without being shipped yet, has already made an actual penetration into the business market, a market that has been the most difficult to penetrate. The first people to sweep these things up, regardless of price, will be the tons of business airplane textmessaging traveloholics. Then, just like the iPod, there will be the halo effect…buying Macs.
“They don’t have the power of OS X. “
No, today they have the power of Windows Mobile and Linux.
Windows Mobile offers infinitely more features for a business user. and Linux vs BSD? Clearly Linux is the more sophisticated and mature embedded OS.
There’s a reason it took Apple 3 years to get this turkey out, when the cellphone industry takes 6-12 months for a new model.
R2 linked us to the Google Video website, which I had forgotten about, and then I spent hours and HOURS watching grainy, jerky Google videos, wasting time, while my family suffered. Oh, the pain, the humiliation, the wasted days and wasted nights. Save me from Google Videos, and YouTube (where you can catch my latest videos of my children – long lost footage remastered and edited, with sound and annotation.) Look for meineinstein.
And please rate highly, comment kindly, and favorite often.